A developmental psychologist hypothesized that children who are reared in famili

Question

A developmental psychologist hypothesized that children who are reared in families where more than one language is spoken will have higher abstract reasoning abilities as adolescents than children reared with just a single language spoken. After obtaining IRB approval through his university, he placed an ad in the local college newspaper asking for parent/child volunteers. Through responses to his ad he was able to recruit 40 children from 12 to 15 years of age, 20 from bilingual families and 20 from monolingual families. He then administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) to all children and focused his analyses on a subscale that assessed abstract reasoning ability. He found that children from bilingual families scored on average 5 percentile points higher on the abstract reasoning subscale than children from monolingual families. This difference was statistically significant at the =.05 level. What type of research design was used? Was there a manipulated independent variable? What was the dependent variable? What were some possible confounding variables in the study? What types of constraints might exist on the ability to generalize the results of the study? How might you improve the way the study was done?

Explanation / Answer

Solution:

For the given scenario, the researcher used two separate independent groups of the students with bilingual and monolingual families. Researcher found the statistically significant difference at the 5% level of significance. For this research study, the researcher use the research design as the parametric hypothesis test – two sample t test for the population mean assuming the separate population variance. Yes, there would be a manipulated independent variable which may impact on the score of the students from two separate groups. The manipulated independent variable would be stress level, physical fitness, etc. For the given research scenario, the dependent variable is given as the score on the abstract reasoning subscale. The possible confounding variables in this study would be stress level of the students, physical fitness of the student, IQ of the student, etc. The constraints related to stress level, fitness, IQ, scale on ability test and other related factors might be exist to generalize the results. For improving the study design, the researcher can use the completely randomized design or randomized block design for avoiding the interaction effects on the model.

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